Rang de Basanti from the film Rang de Basanti (2006)
Teri Mehfil Mein from the film Mughal-e-Azam (1960)
Rob Van Dam wins the WWE Championship at One Night Stand (2006)
CM Punk wins the World Heavyweight Championship (2008)
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I used to have a motorcycle. Back in the summer of '99, I used a little bit of spare cash to buy a 1972 Honda 350. I had no experience riding and I had never learned to drive a stick shift, so I had a bit of a learning curve ahead of me. After I got my temporary permit, I enrolled in a "beginner's" class in motorcycle operation and safety at a nearby Honda plant. Turns out I was the only "beginner" in the class though, as pretty much everyone else in attendance had been riding ever since their childhoods. They were just taking the class looking for some "tips" or whatever. I completed the classroom course, but I quit the driving portion of the course halfway through the day after getting really frustrated with my classmates and instructors. The last straw for the day was when an instructor reached over and killed my bike's ignition after I had completed a lap around the course. I guess in his opinion, I had taken too long to turn the bike off (it was a Honda 150 and I wasn't really familiar with the controls), but as I was trying to remember the process to cut the engine, the guy just did it for me and the bike lurched, almost knocking me over with the bike. That was just enough for me.
I spent some time that summer learning the feel of the bike for myself. When K. was born that September, I took several weeks of paternity leave and I had some fun riding around our neighborhood during K.'s nap times. Truth be told, I never went more than a few miles from home on the bike, but it was a really fun time. I stored the bike that winter and I knew it would need some work come spring. Sure enough, when the weather broke, the bike would not start and it was in need of some significant repair. I took it to a local mechanic who was happy to take a $150 deposit for his promise to fix the bike. Instead, he tore it apart and then let it sit for a few weeks before deciding that he either couldn't or wouldn't fix it. When I asked him if I could have my deposit back, he said that he would give me the $150 back, but that the bike would come back to me in pieces. So I had to give up my deposit if I wanted the bike to be reassembled. When I finally got it back, it was even in worse shape. The electrical system was shot and other things didn't fit or work properly at all. That was it. We didn't have the time or money to do much more. I ended up selling the bike (at a net loss) to a guy who stripped old bikes to make new, "cannibalized" bikes. It was unfortunate. Some years later, I was watching the local news one night and I saw that the same mechanic who had destroyed my bike had been indicted for racketeering. That was a good day.
Every year around this time, I pine for that bike and think about the few good months I had with it. Maybe someday I'll get another chance to run the road.
A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a very funny blog called "Say What?!" The great signs on that site reminded me of one of my favorite pictures from our family trip to Clearwater Florida back in 2000. I snapped the picture below as we passed by the Marlin Motel one afternoon:
I'm guessing their "vacancy" might have something to do with all that warm "poo" they have in the motel, eh?
If
it's the first weekend after Labor Day and the heat index is in the
mid-nineties, then it must be time for the annual Greek Festival.
Despite the heat, we had a good time visiting with friends, eating and
watching the dancers. I am kind of surprised at how much Greek
memorabilia bears the label "Made in China" these days. Did Greece
grant China "Most Favored Nation" trade status or do the Chinese just love Greece?
It
was nice to see that in lieu of tip jars, festival workers were
collecting donations for relief funds to benefit victims of the
wildfires in Greece. Assuming that the cash ultimately gets where it
is needed, this seems like a great idea. As we have some good friends
from Pelopónnisos, we have heard some firsthand tales of how horrible the situation has been in recent weeks. My understanding is that the Red Cross of Greece
is still one of the best places to donate money for relief right now.
The bureaucracy of the Red Cross is often criticized, but the
organization remains one of the best centralized points for the
collection and disbursement of aid for major disasters worldwide. At
any rate, I have already received at least one chain letter for an
allegedly "genuine" ad hoc relief effort that is almost assuredly fake
and I am sure there are more to come. I would rather give to the Red
Cross and know that at least some of the money is getting through as
opposed to having a fly-by-night scam keep my cash for themselves.
On
a completely unrelated note, I have to mention the most interesting
t-shirt that I saw at the festival today. To be clear, the shirt in
question was worn by a female festival attendee and not a festival
worker or anyone affiliated with the church (as far as I could tell). The message on the shirt
read, "Hustle for Jesus." Nice.
Anyway, we have uploaded some photos of the Evzonakia Dancers in a new, off-site photo gallery. (username & password required)
Earlier in the month, we embarked on what was to be this summer's epic family vacation: A trip to Treasure Island, Florida…by car. While Thomai had made the trip by car before, such a long car ride was a first for the kids and me. I had been suffering from bronchitis in the days leading up to the trip and the ride down was a bit unpleasant for me. It would actually be a few days into the trip before I really started feeling better. The girls did well on the two 11+ hour shifts down to Florida and I am happy to say that we went against the advice of many of our fellow young parents who had urged us to buy a DVD player to make the time in the car easier. In lieu of the DVD, we stocked the car with plenty of paper & markers, stuffed animals and the like. We also burned a 3 CD set of "road trip music" for the trip. The "road trip" CDs are becoming something of a family tradition for us and on this trip we had a huge mix that spanned the genres, including cuts by Tom Morello, Bruce Springsteen, Sly and the Family Stone, Kiss, T. Rex, etc. The "kickoff" track for the trip was the title theme to the legendary East German musical "Heisser Sommer (Hot Summer)" and we also had obligatory American vacation songs like "Vacation" by the Go-Go's and "Holiday Road" by Lindsey Buckingham as part of our road trip repertoire. Music definitely made the trip a little easier.
We spent the night at an awful Holiday Inn Express in Smyrna, Georgia. A couple of times during our brief stay there, we encountered a sickly, scantily-clad fellow who spent a fair amount of his time telling the hotel staff about the raccoons that he raised in his apartment. We ultimately concluded that he actually lived behind the hotel and he was just coming in to get food from the hotel's breakfast bar, but we never really figured out if the food was for him or for the raccoons.
While we were driving through Georgia, I caught a news story on the Macon, Georgia NPR affiliate about Macon's outgoing mayor, C. Jack Ellis. Apparently, Ellis has recently angered his constituents by sending an open letter of support to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Hilarious!
The second leg of our drive down to Florida was not so bad, with the exception of a huge tractor-trailer accident (and the ensuing traffic jam) just south of the Florida border. We ended up reaching St. Petersburg/Treasure Island very late in the evening and we stayed at a nice hotel/condo suite on the beach. The furnishings were pretty good – generally better than a hotel's furnishings would be – plus we had the benefit of staying right on the beach, which was a huge plus.
The next morning, we went out to the beach. It was the first time we had been to a beach since Gerakina in 2004. Prior to that, we had visited the St. Petersburg area back in 2001. The girls all had a really nice time playing in the water and on the sand. As for me, I actually spent a fair amount of time thinking about quantum mechanics and the probabilistic/deterministic controversy (so hotly debated by Einstein and Bohr, among others) while I watched the tide move about scores and scores of tiny grains of sand each time water rolled in and out. I'm sure this sounds strange to people, but this is the kind of think I think about when I am at the beach.
One of the things I like to do when visiting a new city is to visit a bookstore or two while I'm in town. On this trip, we went to Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg. It was a pretty cool place and it was just packed to the ceiling with books. In places where the shelves were overcrowded, the overflow was stacked in piles in front of the shelves. This is the kind of place where I could spend hours browsing. I scored a couple of interesting items there, including some volumes of the journal "Chinese Literature" for my collection (someday, I might be fortunate enough have the full run in my home library). I also came upon a 1937 copy of the booklet "China: The March Toward Unity" that seems to have something of an interesting history behind it. I'll write some more on that in another article. Wednesday, we made it to Disney World to visit The Magic Kingdom. It made for a long day as Orlando is about a 2-hour drive from St. Petersburg. It was also an expensive day, especially when you consider we spent about $300 just to get into the park itself. And it was pretty hot too...I think the heat index for each day we were in Florida was over 100 degrees. But, I have to admit, Disney World was a good time, especially for the kids who were thrilled to meet characters and to go on the rides there. It was really something to stand in front of the Cinderella Castle. You know, I hate to make the comparison, but I'm going to do it anyway…It felt a lot like visiting the Parthenon in Greece because I had seen pictures of both of these places all my life but I had never really considered that I might see them in person one day. So that aspect of it is really pretty cool, I must say. Most people we talked with in the days leading up to the trip insisted that we stay for the fireworks show that happens each night at closing and, although it made for a long day, we saw it through and we took in the show at 9 PM that night. I had one of those clichéd moments as a parent when I glanced over at the girls as the show started. The looks on their faces made the long day worth it.
On our last day, we visited the beach in the early evening, but the tide had washed in so much debris and dead sea creatures that the whole area smelled bad. The girls couldn't handle the stench, so the adjourned to the hotel pool, but I stayed behind to look at the stuff that had washed up. I saw a lot of interesting stuff and I picked up some especially nice shells, including a really interesting half of a large conch shell that had a lot of barnacles and odd cracks and crevices from what looked like a long, harsh existence. The drive back home was another two-day affair. We spent some time looking for peaches at several exits in southern Georgia. After striking out at a number of stops, we finally found a old fellow at a fruit and dairy stand a ways off from one of the exits. He seemed like an interesting character and I noticed some pictures on his wall of some professional wrestlers. When I asked him who was in the pictures, he told me in a very matter of fact manner that the pictures were of him with his brother back when they were a tag team called "Alaskan Hunters." I asked if they had wrestled for Georgia Championship Wrestling and he said that not only had they been in GCW, but in WCW and WWF as well. When I mentioned that I was a fan of Jerry Lawler's old Memphis Championship Wrestling show, he shared that the Alaskan Hunters had worked for Lawler back in the mid 1980's. I think that Alaskan Hunters actually held some championship gold for a while back in their heyday. So that was something of a brush with greatness, I guess. I got a batch of boiled peanuts from the guy in addition to the peaches, but I had never had boiled peanuts and I wasn't too crazy about them. Yuck.
The rest of the drive to Atlanta was considerably unpleasant. Around Macon, we hit a decent thunderstorm, and we could see lightning flash all over the sky for miles in several directions. By the time we made it through downtown Atlanta to Marietta, we found that the storm had knocked out the power at the hotel where we had made reservations for the night. They had auxiliary power, so the air and lights were running at about half power for the whole night. Those shortcomings, along with a less than stellar late-night dinner at Chick-fil- a made for an uncomfortable night. Luckily, I had the foresight to buy some wrestling action figures at a Georgia toy store earlier that day, so the girls and I played out a number of grudge matches between Super Crazy and Psicosis before turning in for the night.
The drive home through Tennessee and Kentucky went smoothly, but it was long and we were happy to get home. It all went well enough and the kids were really good to us on the long car rides throughout the course of the trip. We had some good times together and I'm sure we'd all gladly do it over again.
But the next time we go to Florida, I am pretty sure we'll fly there. A two-hour flight really beats the heck out of a 2-day trip by car.
You can view pictures of our trip here. (username & password required)
From the flat plains of Ohio we drifted out one day, for the southern part of the journey Underneath the bridge, the Ohio River sang As we headed for the Hills of West Virginia
As kind of an early and abbreviated summer vacation, we drove down to the Huntington, West Virginia/Ashland, Kentucky area last weekend. When I was born – so the story goes – my folks were living in Ashland but there were no hospitals delivering babies on that side of the river at the time. So I was delivered across the river in Huntington. We left the Ashland area in 1982 or 1983 and I didn't make it back to visit until 1997 or so. On that visit, Thomai and I took Domino along (this was before our girls came along) and we did a little sight seeing, but it was hard to get around with our big, goofy dog in tow. In the 10 years that have passed, I have wanted to go back and visit from time to time and when the opportunity presented itself this year, we jumped at it.
I have a lot of fond memories of the Ashland/Huntington area. I especially appreciate the hills, mountains and the forests of the area after having spent the last two decades of my life in the flat, flat Miami Valley of southwestern Ohio. During the drive to Huntington, I even found myself starting to sound a bit like my dad as I tried to explain to the kids how glaciers had shaped the terrain of our part of Ohio. I probably didn't get all the details right, but at least it sounded pretty good at the time. The terrain really starts to change around Chillicothe, Ohio as you head east on SR-35 and then south down SR-23. The rolling hills and high mountains even reminded me a bit of Greece. The treacherous drive down SR-335 was about as unnerving as the rural roads in northeastern Greece.
We reached Huntington by Friday afternoon and that evening, we visited my old neighborhood in the Russell/Flatwoods area and I took a bunch of pictures. The old neighborhood looks a lot like it used to in some respects, but there has also been a fair amount of growth in the area over the years. The vacant lot next to our old house is now filled with a house that almost seems a bit too large for its lot. I spent a lot of afternoons playing in the lot as well as in the field and woods behind it, but all of those things are gone now. K. and I walked through the side yard of the newer house to venture back into the area that used be known as "The Creek." I had not been this adventurous when we visited back in 1997 and I was really curious to check it out this time. Sure enough, "The Creek" and the surrounding woods are pretty much gone. All that remains is a small drainage ditch that is virtually dry (although I could still make out a trickle of dark orange water flowing in the remnants of the creek bed). There is a smaller drainage ditch running from the street back to the old creek, but it was mostly covered by grass and it was completely dry – something I learned as I accidentally stepped into it, almost twisting my ankle twice on the way back to the car.
Dinner at the old Giovanni's
We drove down the access road behind our old neighbors' home and I saw that the tree line along the back of their home (and the neighboring homes) was all gone (a bit of it remained in 1997). Our neighbors' big back yard is now filled with a large in-ground pool and our old back yard is now home to a large modular garage-like building. The farm land that used to be in back of our homes is now developed into newer homes and apartments. It's progress, I suppose. I still have dreams about these places to this day and I am grateful for my fond memories.
We ate dinner at the Giovanni's in Flatwoods. My folks use to take us to Giovanni's on weekends and I remember some good times there. There are actually Giovanni's restaurants all over the eastern Kentucky/southern Ohio area now, but we managed to find the one that I remembered from my childhood. The interior has been remodeled and they serve their pizza buffet-style now, but the pizza itself is just as good as I had remembered it and it was a big hit with Thomai and the girls. We had a great time.
Saturday morning, I ventured into Huntington by myself, hoping to visit a book store. I had found a listing for the store in a phone book at the hotel and I printed some MapQuest directions off of a computer in the hotel's media center. Somehow, though, the MapQuest directions were incredibly inaccurate and the led me to a spot that was about 2 miles away from my real destination. I did have a decent enough time driving around the city, though, and a nice old man outside the YMCA gave me the directions that I needed to reach the store. I was a little disappointed to find that the bookstore I had been seeking was basically a chain store that sold mostly new books, but I was really impressed at their selection of independent and lefty political magazines and I picked up copies of a few good ones that I had never even heard of: The Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, The Northeastern Anarchist, and Socialism and Liberation. I figured these would make some good reading at the hotel, but as I was paying for them I did make a mental note of the fact that I had read exclusively from a small cache of 1970's comic books since our arrival the day before. This was despite the fact that I had also brought a decent supply of serious reading material by Angela Davis, Alexander Pushkin and others along on the trip.
After meeting up with the girls back at the hotel, we went back to downtown Huntington for lunch at the Marshall University Hall of Fame Café. Our lunch was surprisingly good. We walked around downtown for a bit and rested at the hotel before we set out for our big activity of the day – a visit to Camden Park.
I had been to Camden Park a handful of times as a kid and I am guessing that the last time I had visited was around 25 years ago. The absolutely amazing thing about our visit was that the place seemed virtually unchanged to me. The big sign out front was just as I'd remembered it and the big attractions like the "Dodge 'em" cars and the Haunted House looked just as they had in my mind's eye for all these years. I had mentioned the Haunted House ride to K. because she is something of a Scooby-Doo aficionado and she was interested in checking it out. The last thing she said before the ride started was "This isn't scary at all." This statement was followed by about two and a half minutes of absolute terror for K. I spent most of the ride reassuring her that I was right next to her and once it was all over, I promised her that she would never have to go on the ride again.
To me, the biggest change at the park seemed to be the old train ride, which I used to call "The Indian Train" when I was a kid. It used to be a "wild west" train ride through "Indian territory" and as I recall, there was a soundtrack of war whoops and battle noises along with battle scenes featuring painted statues. I think some of them might have been pretty morbid. I seem to recall a tomahawk scene, but I can't recall for sure. Anyway, the train ride is now just that: a simple train ride. It's a short loop around part of the park and you can look at the log flume and paddle boat pond while you're enjoying the ride. I kind of figured that the train "engineer" was probably the same one from two and a half decades ago, but I didn't have the heart to ask him how long he had been there. He looked pretty worn out.
Z. had her fist experience with the cruel world of carnival games while we were at Camden Park. Thomai took her to a kiosk which featured a game where players use little catapult-like devices to try and lob plastic frog son to small lilly pads. If you can land 3 out of 4 frogs on the pad, you win a giant stuffed SpongeBob. After 4 unsuccessful attempts, Zoya decided to take on the lady who was running the booth. "HEY," she yelled, "Is this game hard or WHAT? We're not winning ANYTHING!" The park worker had a good laugh at Z.'s display of chutzpah.
After the park, we got some dinner at Bob Evans, which was the only restaurant in town that was still open that time of the night (9:30 PM!) . We usually steer clear of Bob Evans, but it wasn't as bad as we were expecting this time. It was actually pretty nice. The fact that we were all together, relaxing, laughing and enjoying ourselves made what was an ordinary meal feel very special.
Once we got back to the hotel, we were all pretty tired. Thomai and K. were ready to sleep, but Z. still had a little life left in her. I decided to try to read a bit from the volume of of Pushkin I had brought along, thinking that would help me get ready for sleep. Since the lights were all out in the room, I read with the flashlight I had brought. Z. was interested in what I was reading and she wanted me to read out loud to her, so I read a bit from Pushkin's "The Tale of the Golden Cockerel." Thomai and K. groaned with every stanza and Z. shushed them a few times, saying, "My daddy and I like to READ!" Eventually, though, I gave into the pleas for peace and quiet from the other side of the room and we all drifted off to sleep, exhausted from our eventful day.
The next morning, we went through the motions of the typical "last day" of a vacation, packing our things, combing through the room to make sure weren't leaving stuff behind, checking out and all that stuff. We were already reminiscing about our great little vacation as we headed for home.
Many years ago, the great Phil Ochs wrote his song "The Hills of West Virginia" during a trip to Hazard, Kentucky. He said he wrote the lyrics as a way of taking pictures with his mind on account of the fact he had forgotten to bring his camera along with him. Luckily, we remembered to take a camera on our trip and I have posted a small gallery of photos here.
So, here is my true confession: I went to Wal-Mart today.
Okay, there's more to it...I actually bought something there.
It wasn't so much of a necessity as it was a last resort. I got some new eyeglasses earlier in the week and I was told by the lady at the optical center that a sunglasses clip-on was not available for my frames. She also was quite frank in her assertion that I probably wouldn't find a clip-on set for the frames anywhere else. At the time, I had guessed she was blowing smoke because she was also pushing me to buy a set of prescription sunglasses. My regular set was expensive enough (even with my eye plan discount and the fact that I was buying my glasses from Sears), so I decided to go with the frames that I had selected and hope I could find some clip-ons somewhere else.
I quickly found that I was in for a long search. None of the retailers or drug stores that I visited had anything that would fit my new frames. I was pretty well resigned to the idea that I would have to either buy some giant, Elvis-sized "over glasses" shades or get used to squinting. But then my sister-in law said the dreaded two words — or maybe it's just one dreaded hyphenated word — either way, she said it: Wal-Mart. Apparently, they have a really good selection of clip-on shades. Aargh.
I have complained about Wal-Mart a lot in the past. No need to go into all of that again, I suppose. As recently as a few months ago, I got kind of salty when I found out that a friend of mine had bought a gift for me from a Wal-Mart store (Of course, she explained rather bluntly that I needed to just accept the gift and shut the hell up and I was quick to do so in an effort to avoid bodily injury.) The point is, I was getting desperate enough to check it out. I actually stopped at one more place before venturing into Wal-Mart, and I even had a huge-ass set of "over glasses" shades in my hand, but I couldn't bring myself to pay $19.99 to look that bad. Besides, I didn't have a white belt and white shoes to complete the outfit. So I stopped into Wal-Mart. I had a lot of stuff swirling in my head during the walk in...I especially thought of my pal Greg Goodlander and his essay "Waging War with Wal-Mart" from back in 2004. I also thought about the documentary "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices" and the film's candid presentation of the retail giant's business and labor practices. And I thought about the first time that my wife took our relatives from Greece to Wal-Mart (the Notorious HDG claims that it was a Meijer store) and Thia Lena looked around and exclaimed, "Who in the hell is going to buy all of this shit?!" Union-busting, institutionalized discrimination and sexism...Yep, Wal-Mart has it all.
It had been at least three years since I had even set foot in a Wal-Mart and I hadn't bought anything because I was so uncomfortable. Wal-Mart stores have a surreal, circus-like feeling to me and I remember well the last conversation I overheard when I visited Wal-Mart several years ago. A kid of about seven or eight years of age had picked up a package of colored markers and he showed them to his mom:
Kid: These look very useful. Mom: Everything you say is stupid and I'm getting tired of it.
Wow. Way to go. The "Supermom" t-shirts are in aisle six between the giant metal canisters of caramel popcorn and the floral print Bible slipcovers, lady. I left the store empty-handed after overhearing that exchange that day. When I went back today, that conversation was still ringing in my ears. I hoped that nobody that I knew would see me there. Of course, I did run into someone there and we had a brief, obligatory exchange. I had also kind of hoped that I would come up empty-handed on my search for a decent clip-on despite the fact that I was already tired of squinting from the bright summer sun. But I didn't leave empty-handed this time.
The long and short of this story is that they had clip-ons that were a perfect fit. And they were far cheaper than the gigantic spot-welding goggles at the drugstore. So, I bought them. I'm not proud, but I can now see comfortably when I'm outside.
This past Friday, Thomai and K. had some plans for a special night out, so Baby Z. and I had the evening to ourselves. As we headed out and about, I fired up the CD changer in my car and I cranked the "Hell Bent for Leather" CD by Judas Priest. The first track I put on was "Rock Forever" and at one point I was surprised to look in my rear view mirror to see Baby Z. playing a perfect air guitar and nodding her head back and forth like a true rocker. "Evening Star" was next and she complained that the song was too slow, so I skipped to "Take On The World". Although that was a slow song as well, she liked the thunderous drums from the track so we rocked out some more. By the time we got to "The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Pronged Crown)," I had decided that it was time to teach Z. the "Horns Up" salute. After a few attempts she nailed it perfectly and then I yelled, "Now shake it back and forth and yell, "Woooooo!'" She's a fast learner! We were probably quite a sight as we drove down the street yelling and totally rocking out! When we reached "Running Wild" on the CD, I noticed that things had become very, very quiet in the back seat. I looked back again and I saw Z. fast asleep while Priest blared all around her. Headbanging is hard work when you're only three years old!
I had been to Camden Park a handful of times as a kid and I am guessing that the last time I had visited was around 25 years ago. The absolutely amazing thing about our visit was that the place seemed virtually unchanged to me. The big sign out front was just as I'd remembered it and the big attractions like the "Dodge 'em" cars and the Haunted House looked just as they had in my mind's eye for all these years. I had mentioned the Haunted House ride to K. because she is something of a Scooby-Doo aficionado and she was interested in checking it out. The last thing she said before the ride started was "This isn't scary at all." This statement was followed by about two and a half minutes of absolute terror for K. I spent most of the ride reassuring her that I was right next to her and once it was all over, I promised her that she would never have to go on the ride again.
This past Friday, Thomai and K. had some plans for a special night out, so Baby Z. and I had the evening to ourselves. As we headed out and about, I fired up the CD changer in my car and I cranked the "
